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31 August 2010

Introduction

This is my attempt at a record of the things I cook. Most of my recipes come from online so I can't exactly scribble my notes in the margins like a proper cookbook owner, so this will have to do.

At the moment I am living in Germany with the various and numerous amount of people who live in my family's house. My mother and I take turns to cook on alternate nights for the (currently) eight people who demand food daily. Soon, however, we will have visitors, and dinners will have to serve 10 for almost two weeks.

Yesterday:

Slow-roasted chicken dinner for 8.

3 roast chickens, cooked in lemon juice, honey, and dried thyme. (Salt, pepper and olive oil.) Slow roasted for 1 hour in the oven at 135 degrees C, cooled for 1/2 hour, slow roasted for 1 hour in the mini oven at 135 degrees C, kept hot on 2 hobs on low heat, slow roasted for 15 minutes at 135 degrees C, rested for 10 minutes. (Lemon/honey/thyme mixture made lovely gravy!) Could have done with perhaps 15 minutes more, but was properly cooked anyway. The skin was black and crispy but not bitter; the meat was extremely tender and juicy. Basted a few times, didn't keep track.

Cauliflower cheese, prepared on the hob (cheese sauce made with cornflour - no flour), baked for 20 minutes at 180 degrees C.

Spinach, boiled from frozen. My dad served his with vinegar but I was too much of a wuss to try it.

Notes: yesterday the oven blew a fuse and cut out all the power, so I panicked for a while and then attempted to make all the food in my brother's mini-oven that is roughly the size of a microwave. A roast dinner for EIGHT. What's more, a SLOW-roasted dinner for eight. And the mini-oven was upstairs, far away from the kitchen, because the power had not come back on in the kitchen when I put the chicken back on. It was... interesting. Also, we discovered that the gravy granules form no lumps when mixed with cold, rather than hot, water.

Today:

Chicken stock.

Two onions, three garlic cloves, some leftover potato and cauliflower cheese were briefly fried; I then added a couple of cups of white wine. I added the three chicken carcasses, with salt, pepper, garlic powder, and some ginger. Boiled for 2.5 hours - far too little stock left, about 100ml. Whoops.